Gothic Language Projects

A page with all the Gothic language-related stuff I’ve done.

A bit about me: I’m bilingual in English and German. And I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the Gothic language for some reason, and recently (2025) found interest in it again due to realising that even after Arianism, it, a Germanic language, was seemingly used liturgically to some extent for centuries under Eastern Orthodox Christianity (of which I’m an inquirer). Though due to its Arian connotations, I’ve translated the Nicene Creed and want to translate various other liturgical texts, prayers and lives of the saints into the Gothic language, having the language “baptised into Christ”. I’m also into conlanging, calligraphy, software development, writing systems (how I found the Gothic language originally) and dozenal.

In my Latin alphabet transcriptions, for native words, ai and au without diacritics are pronounced short (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/) before h, ƕ and r, and long (/ɛː/ and /ɔː/, or /ai/ and /au/) otherwise. The diacritics then indicate the exceptional cases, and are short, and ái and áu are long. For non-native words, ai and au are always short unless marked otherwise. This way, it’s easier to spot and learn the exceptional cases when reading only in the Gothic alphabet. I also try to mark all cases of long a and u as ā and ū. And I don’t add diaeresis on i at the start of words as they were there in the manuscripts to help read Gothic when it was written without spaces … and they’re a pain to write all the time. I still add them stylistically, and within words to mark the start of a syllable, e.g. innïddja.

Feel free to contact me about anything; feedback greatly appreciated!


Tools


Sites

  • Widr – The weather in Gothic



Translations

On the following pages, click on the lines to see translations and notes, and to see the Gothic text in the Latin script, click the “L” button in the top right corner.

Christian

Liturgical

Saints

Biblical

Poems

Other

Other

Poems

Stories


Fonts


Links

Various other Gothic-related things, not by me, but useful and interesting.

Works

  • Bokahus – Collection of works
  • Glǽmscrafu – Has some works by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Skaldic Bard
  • Lyrics in Gothic
  • Tríar Manach
  • The Modern Gothic Bible Restoration – I’ll admit my Gothic language ability isn’t particularly high, but for a book over which translations are intensely fought and the wording is vitally important theologically, with the multitude of contributors, the quality is somewhat inconsistent. I do like the sentiment though, and don’t mean to discourage.

Fragments

Onomastics

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